Tuesday, June 12, 2007

A1: "Wildfire report raises concerns of gun range neighbors"

Yeah, if the business next door was setting my neighborhood on fire, I'd be a little concerned too. Anybody else think the shooting range is getting kid-gloves treatment here? It's not like it hasn't happened before.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Which came first, the range or the houses?

Steven Ayres said...

What came first was public land.

Do you mean to say that since the homes came after the shooting range, they should just accept the risk?

Anonymous said...

They knew what they were buying next to. Same goes with the people in the Cliff Rose subdivision who complained about the cement batch plant years ago; the batch plant was there 40 years before they bought their homes. No sympathy here.

Anonymous said...

A cement batch plant won't burn your house down. Bottom line, these 'sportsmen' need to be more careful or shoot indoors. If they won't allow fireworks in Arizona, then why do they allow outdoor shooting? And don't throw this 2nd Amendment BS at me. Just because you have a 'right' to "bear arms" (a militia right, not a personal right; read the BOR) doesn't give you a right to practice shooting at the risk of the population. Wake up. jared

leftturnclyde said...

it seems to me the thing to do would be to clean up the dead brush around the shooting range no ?
and judgeing from this quote
"It's the loud shooting, and the fact that they caused a forest fire that's upset me," said Bev Reid, whose home is one of the closest to the shooting range. "I think they should move it someplace else."Reid said she has nothing against shooting sports and she knew about the range when she moved in seven years ago, but she now has 6-year-old grandchildren living with her so she's more concerned about safety than ever.
that neighbors opposed to the range are using the fire as a yummy chocolate coating for the real complaint which is the fact that the range is there at all.hey you knew it was there when you moved in..
if you wanna pity hapless homeowners look whats happening down here in PV or to the folks who are gonna have lowes for a neighbor. man I bet those people just love havin a hundred foot pile of dirt being erected next to their property with out their permission

Anonymous said...

i don't think anyone comes out looking very good here. given that wildfires caused by shooters seem to be pretty rare, there appear to be some safety problems out there on the range.

and if the neighbors want to use this as an excuse to get rid of an annoyance that they knew about when they moved in, they deserve to fail.

Steven Ayres said...

Bear in mind also that it's not just the neighbors dealing with the risk of the fire, it's the whole community dealing with the costs. We got lucky this time. If the next fire starts half a mile away, the rangemaster might not see it right away. If that happens to burn up a couple of houses and a fire fighter, would you really see it as just a problem for the insurance company?

I rather doubt that any homeowner moving in there considered the risk of shrapnel starting a brush fire. It's not exactly intuitive, and I'm sure it wasn't in the brochures.

What we have here is ultimately a side effect of population overgrowth. This time it's threatening the gun enthusiasts rather than the tree-huggers, but it's exactly the same problem.

leftturnclyde said...

good call on the out of control growth
however
..clean up the dead brush around the range.